Russians to suffer from residue of communism for 25 more years
[From RIA Novosti's digest of the Russian press]
Russians will not overcome the residual effects of communism until 2030, said Alberto Alesina, a professor in the Economics Department at Harvard University. East Germans will need one or two generations to get rid of the communist mentality, he said. Since Russia has been building communism much longer, it will need more time to overcome its effects.
However, not all Russian colleagues of the American professor share his view.
We will need more than two generations, said Ksenia Yudayeva, an expert on privatization who sits on the Academic Council of the Moscow Carnegie Center. The first generation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union is learning a mixed mentality from their parents and teachers, but the children of this generation will be more Westernized.
"Russia will need longer than East Germany and not only because it had covered a longer road to communism," said Yekaterina Zhuravskaya, research head at the Center of Economic and Financial Studies and Projects. East Germany has always had West Germany as a model to copy. And before Germany was split into two countries, it had market institutions, though Nazism hindered their development. But Russia jumped from czarism into socialism and lived behind the Iron Curtain until the early 1990s.
The American scientist has picked a subject too narrow for his study the people's attitude to state interference in the life of society, said Vladimir Magun, head of personality studies at the Institute of Social Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. "There are background assumptions that cannot be overcome in less than two generations, but many more fundamental things change much faster," he said.
Vladimir Poznyakov, a leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Psychology Institute, fully agrees with Magun. There are many people in Moscow who are free from the burden of the past, he said, but little has changed for most Russians in the last 15 years. "But they will have to change anyway, as the choice is between dying and adjusting," Poznyakov said without much optimism.
